The Yosemite

Description

John Muir’s classic, restored and reconsidered, with the buried history none of us learned in school.

In 1912, John Muir wrote The Yosemite to make the country love a valley enough to save it. His account of the waterfalls, the storms, the giant sequoias, and the high country remains some of the finest nature writing in the English language, and it helped shape the very idea of a national park.

Muir saw the granite and the light with rare clarity. He saw the people who had lived there for thousands of years hardly at all. This new edition sets his book back into its own moment and next to what we have learned since.

A substantial new foreword traces the history that popular accounts of Yosemite leave out:

• The valley’s older names, and the people who gave them: the Ahwahneechee, driven out beginning in 1851.
• The eighteen treaties negotiated with California tribes in 1851 and 1852, which the U.S. Senate refused to ratify and then ordered kept secret for half a century.
• Hetch Hetchy, the second Yosemite valley, dammed for a distant city while Muir fought the loss and lost.
• The long removal of the last Native residents from the valley, which the National Park Service finished in 1969, within living memory.

The foreword also asks a fair question about Muir himself: how much his views reflected his era, and how much they changed over a lifetime. It admires his writing without excusing its blind spots.

This edition includes:

• Muir’s complete 1912 text, freshly and readably typeset.
• Historic photographs, maps, and annotations.
• Corrected botanical names and light editorial notes.
• A “For Further Reading” guide for those who want to go deeper.

For readers who love Yosemite and for students of conservation and American history, this is the whole story of a place we thought we knew. Muir wanted us to love it enough to defend it. That begins with telling the truth about its deep history.